Lean Enterprise Value Phase III

In this phase the LAI vision and mission changed in several ways to emphasize the aerospace workforce and total life cycle value:

Vision: “To deliver military aerospace products at significantly reduced costs and cycle time while meeting or exceeding performance expectations and enhancing the effectiveness of our national workforce.”

Mission: “To enable fundamental change within industry and government operations that supports the continuing transformation of the US aerospace enterprise towards providing aerospace systems offering best life-cycle value.”

Activities planned throughout the phase called for the completion of the Enterprise Transition-to-Lean Roadmap, development of a Lean Short course, the LAI book and a number of monographs and team products in addition to the normal workshops and study projects. The consortium also planned to develop a “Lean Assessment Tool” later known as the Lean Enterprise Self-Assessment Tool (LESAT).

Major Accomplishments

The LAI book, Lean Enterprise Value: Insights from MIT’s Lean Aerospace Initiative, was completed toward the end of Phase III. This endeavor culminated two years of dedicated efforts by the LAI research staff with many inputs from industry and government. The book, published in March 2002 by Palgrave Publisher, Ltd., captured the wake-up call to the industry and covered the industrial response over the last 12 years. It takes the reader on the “lean” journey from its origins and major change initiatives through concepts of lean enterprises, and Creating Enterprise Value – exploring the challenge to the aerospace industry to adopt to change with ideas of waste elimination and value creation as the central tenet.

Research also continued at a feverish pace.

The research insights from our six research teams addressed:

• Leadership’s impact on organizational change
• Lean practices for deriving software requirements
• Best practices in user needs/requirements generation
• Electronic sector manufacturing study
• An avionics lifecycle forecasting model
• Space launch operations and capacity modeling
• The impact of modeling and simulation in the generation of system level requirements
• Space system-level integration and test discrepancies
• Multidisciplinary design problem solving on product development teams

The LAI teams made continued progress in data gathering to add to the LAI knowledge and tools. Significant insights came from our teams’ research efforts on pace Systems, Acquisition, Product Development, including Value Stream Analysis, Manufacturing, Supplier Networks and Enterprises.

Products

In addition to several journal articles, research also led to the development and completion of several LAI products and tools, including our Lean Enterprise Model, our Production Operations Transition-to-Lean Roadmap, the Enterprise Transition-to-Lean Roadmap, and LESAT tools.

The Enterprise Transition-to-Lean (Enterprise TTL) Roadmap was completed and a three-volume set (Executive Overview, Transition-to-Lean, and Roadmap Explorations) was published for our consortium members. A companion effort in the Manufacturing Systems Research Team also completed its Production Operations Transition-to-Lean Roadmap.

In addition the Lean Enterprise Model web site was enhanced with additional benchmarking and research data.

Also, a significant addition to the lean toolsets was completed: the Lean Enterprise Self Assessment Tool (LESAT). This effort culminated a year and a half of dedicated efforts by a broad set of the LAI membership as the LESAT was developed, tested, refined and published. In addition, this tool was developed in collaboration with the United Kingdom Lean Aerospace Initiative, principally the University of Warwick. The LESAT is a tool for self-assessing the present state of “leanness” of an enterprise and its readiness to change

Finally, toward the end of the phase, elements of the new Enterprise Value Phase of LAI were adopted including the Executive Committee, a Stewards Network, initial organizational elements for a LAI Educational Network and the establishment of a strategic partnership with the Defense Acquisition University (DAU).